The Reds were all this time coming nearer; and, finally, at Bolotnaya, we had to abandon our train and take to sleighs. We had the very best reason for doing so, as, in the first place, we were blocked behind a long ribbon of trains without any prospect of getting off for a week; and as, in the second place, we were told by General Pepelaiev that Novo-Nikolaevsk had been captured, and that the Reds were making a cutting-off movement from it, north of the railway, on sleighs, with Oyash or perhaps Bolotnaya as their objective. “I am leaving myself in a few minutes,” said Pepelaiev in conclusion. “If you stay here forty-eight hours longer you will certainly be captured.”

As a matter of fact the Reds were at Bolotnaya long before the expiration of that time, but they did not find us there, for we had left the village some six hours earlier. We had great difficulty in getting sleighs, for every sleigh was being used, either by its owner or by troops who had commandeered it; and the town commandant on whom I and another officer called told us that it was absolutely impossible for him to get us vehicles of any description. My companion happened to meet in the street, however, some Jaeger officers belonging to a howitzer battery which had been equipped a year before by General Knox, and these officers said that all our party could travel in the sleigh of their detachment. The conditions were such, however, that the ladies could not be brought; but we persuaded the commandant of an echelon on the west track to take one of our railway carriages with him, and into this carriage we crowded all the women, children, and old people who had been specially entrusted to us. There was no room in this carriage for any of our officers save one, who was sick, and the train commandant would not attach more than one additional carriage to his train, which was on the point of leaving. This carriage reached Taiga safely with all its occupants, and we joined it there afterwards.

Having thus done all we could for our Russian protégés, we tried to find our sleighs, but that task was rendered exceedingly difficult by the darkness, the crowds, the confusion, and the fact that there were many sleighs, all rushing past at a great speed, and that we had no means of telling which were ours. Finally, a number of vehicles went past laden with ammunition, equipment, and baggage; and one of our Russian officer-interpreters cried out: “These are they. Jump on anyhow!” He himself, together with his wife, were comfortably installed in the best sleigh, but there was no time to ask him for explanations on that or any other subject, as he shot past like an express train.

How the rest of us managed, without mishap, to scramble aboard the succeeding sleighs borders on the miraculous, but, as I discovered three days afterwards, none of us was left behind on this occasion. Owing to the weight which it already carried, no sleigh could take more than one passenger, so that for most of the next three days we were each isolated by the darkness and the cold as effectually as if we had each been imprisoned alone in an underground dungeon with hundreds of miles between us. All the energies of every one of us were concentrated on the task of clinging to the pile of baggage on which he sat, and on watching continually for the first symptoms of frost-bite in his face and limbs. None of us had enough spare force even to think of anything else. In ordinary times a sleigh can travel from Bolotnaya to Taiga in one day, but we took three days owing to the fact that we made a detour to the north in order to avoid the traffic, and for the same reason we travelled most of the time by night.

Owing to the roughness of the road and to the number of gullies, camouflaged with snow, which had to be crossed, we were frequently thrown off our sleighs, and several of us got lost for a considerable time in the forest. Private James of the Hampshires, who had just come from the hottest part of India, where he had had a sunstroke, got one of his heels frost-bitten, and the affected part turned black as tar. Another of our party, after having been pitched out of one sleigh and knocked down by another, and run over by a third, and rapped on the knuckles by the driver of a fourth on which he had managed for a moment to get a precarious hold, finally fell into the deep snow alongside the track on top of a frozen corpse; and there was hardly one of us that escaped some adventure of the same kind. It was a serious matter to get thrown off one’s sleigh, and that for the following reasons: the track was narrow, the snow on each side deep, the pace very rapid; and it was, therefore, no easy matter to get aboard another sleigh, especially as the driver always objected to a stranger attempting to board him in the darkness. Trying to get into a sleigh was like trying to get into an overladen boat pushing off from a wreck, and the izvoshchik sometimes treated an intruder as the boatman would, striking at his benumbed hands with the butt-end of his whip in order to make him release his hold. And he could not be blamed for doing so, as any addition to the weight drawn by his tired horse might have been fatal to himself, and lead to the loss of the ammunition which he carried. Besides, it must be remembered that this was not a joy-ride, but a sauve qui peut. It was a time of war—nay, more than that, it was the worst period of the most terrible civil war which modern history has seen. The wonder is that such of us as were thrown out ever escaped being left behind.

One of our party who fell off his sleigh the first night managed, after floundering about for some time in the snow, to get into another. It was some time before he discovered that this sleigh did not belong to our party, and was, moreover, going in the wrong direction, perhaps to bring information to the Bolsheviks. Being wrapped up in furs and blankets, the two other occupants did not at once notice his presence; but, as soon as they did, they promptly threw him out, and then he found himself in a desert of snow without any other sleigh in sight. Luckily, however, he met by the merest chance a Jaeger horseman, who enabled him to overtake our party which had been held up by a gully. Had he been left behind he would have tumbled about hopelessly for a few hours through the illimitable white waste; he would have fallen into gullies; he would have lost his spectacles; his eyes would have become filled with snow; his eyelashes would have become heavy with icicles; and, finally, his frozen corpse would have been added to the hundreds of others which marked the track of Kolchak’s terrible retreat. I was afterwards told at Omsk by Mikhailov, the war correspondent of the Pravda, who had taken part in the pursuit, that about a thousand frozen corpses of White soldiers had been found by the Reds in the snow between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk, and we ourselves came across five or six corpses between Bolotnaya and Taiga. And here I might say, though I began this account for the general public with the deliberate intention of telling nothing about the really frightful and terrifying aspects of this débâcle, that, in some of the Russian Red Cross trains, callous hospital assistants made a practice of stripping corpses stark naked, and then piling them in the open, like logs of wood, alongside the track. Their object in stripping them was to get their garments, clothing being in that intense cold as much a necessity of life as food; but I could never understand the want of reverence for the dead and of regard for the feelings of the living which was exhibited by the exposure of these bodies on the roadside, even in large towns like Novo-Nikolaevsk, when it would have been easy to put them inside the many deserted houses, where school children could not collect around them as they did, or to cover them with at least a few shovelfuls of snow. Ordinary burial was, of course, out of the question, for the frozen earth was hard as granite and would have had to be blasted with dynamite.

During a life spent in war, sometimes conducted in savage countries, I have never seen similar disrespect shown to the dead save in China, and there only in the case of decapitated criminals; but I must say that, in the present instance, this disrespect was exhibited only by those dead-house gentry whom prolonged warfare, even in civilized lands, tends to dehumanize. Handling corpses as they do every day of their lives, these hospital ghouls sometimes have in the end literally no more respect for a dead man than they have for a dead horse. They become like animals, losing absolutely and for ever the instinctive reverence on this point which we find even among the most degraded races. With the soldiers in the field it is always different; and, despite their far greater need for warm clothing, I never knew during this retreat of Russian soldiers taking even the overcoat from one of their comrades who had fallen by the wayside.

I refrain from saying a word about the appalling typhus horror, which led in one case to an echelon reaching its destination with 50 per cent. of its passengers dying or dead, but I felt that I must make some allusion to the terrible fact mentioned above, owing to the profound impression of savagery and utter demoralization which it made on my comrades and myself. It seemed to us that even the most elementary observances of the most primitive civilization had been swept away by this tidal wave of civil war, that human culture had collapsed, and that the end of all things was approaching.

A comparatively minor matter was the reckless way in which the Russian soldiers threw away their lives by drinking motor spirit. Though they had no motors, and though they found their guns, their ammunition, and sometimes even their rifles too heavy to bring along with them, they managed nevertheless to carry occasionally in a sleigh, which they handled with the most exquisite skill and care, a huge cylinder of motor spirit whereof some of them were mad enough to drink. After a few hours of wild hilarity many soldiers who had tasted this poison collapsed, and then fell an easy prey to the terrible Demon of the Ice, who was always on the alert, always watching for a chance to strike.

Just as a railway engine has to stop periodically in order to take in water and fuel, so had we to stop occasionally in order to absorb, in the warm cottages, a supply of animal heat. We did not eat or drink anything; we simply sat or stood till the marrow in our bones had thawed. Then we went again into the external cold, whose first touch was like the blow of a whip across the face, and prepared to push on. No matter how warmly one was clad, even though one was protected by layer upon layer of non-conductors like hot water in a Thermos flask, a leakage of the animal heat still went on steadily, and, unless one replenished his stock of vital warmth several times a day by the means I have described, he was inevitably overtaken by sleepiness, collapse, and death.

I pitied from my heart the poor Siberian peasants, whose houses were thus invaded all day and filled every night by endless relays of armed men who ate up all the food; used up all the fuel; took away all the fodder, sleighs, horses, and cattle; and frequently compelled all the men and boys to accompany them. When Kolchak’s armies afterwards went to pieces at Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk, they left behind them, like spars and wreckage marking the spot where they had gone down, thousands of these unfortunate peasants, their horses lost, their sleighs smashed, themselves without money or food or any means of getting back to their homes. I have got terrible statistics bearing on this subject, but this is not the place to give them; and I shall here confine myself to saying that districts, large as England, where there formerly were villages and cultivated fields, have now been reduced to the condition of deserts and are quite uninhabited.

The patience of the unfortunate peasants in the face of all these calamities was almost Christ-like, but, on the other hand, the private soldiers who invaded their houses could not help doing so, for was it not “war,” which excuses everything?

On one occasion the soldiers who filled a peasant’s hut and who, to do them justice, kept as quiet as mice were politely requested by the owner to go outside for a few moments in order that the good woman of the house might give birth to a child. When they returned the child had already come into the world, and the mother, evidently none the worse for the ordeal she had just gone through, was at the fireplace making tea.

Sometimes most of the floor was covered with sleeping soldiers tightly wedged together, and whenever one of these recumbent forms stirred itself and got up, there was a move towards the vacant place on the part of those who had been left standing and expectant. It reminded me of strap-hangers in a crowded London tramcar moving towards a vacated seat. I might here observe that this promiscuous way of sleeping contributed to the spread of typhus, as did also the habit of wearing clothes taken from corpses.

Sometimes mere children were taken from the villages in order to drive sleighs for the retreating troops. Two of our British soldiers who had brought some brandy with them once offered some of it to a burly driver who sat in front of them, and who accepted the offer with alacrity, but in a curious, piping voice. When, towards evening, all three went into a house to warm themselves, the Tommies looked on in astonishment, while their driver peeled off coat after coat, growing gradually smaller and smaller as he did so, until at last, when they had begun to fear that there was no human kernel at all inside all those furry husks, a small boy of about fourteen years of age stood grinning before them.

My own experiences on this trip were not as bad as those which some of my comrades had, but naturally they impressed me more, not only because they were my own, but also because I was older than most of the other members of our party, whose average age, if we exclude old Sergeant-Major Walters and a few others, was somewhere about nineteen. During the first night’s wild ride I had taken advantage of a stoppage to get out and walk, for my feet were getting frozen. Then a very common thing happened. The long line of sleighs stretching into the darkness in front of me suddenly put itself in motion. The sleigh ahead of mine went off like an arrow shot from a bow. My sleigh followed automatically, despite all the efforts of the driver to moderate the speed of his horses until I could get in. I clutched the rear of the vehicle, but my desperate attempts to hoist myself aboard were all in vain, owing to the weight of clothing which I carried. I wore two fur overcoats, one on top of the other, and likewise two pairs of fur gloves, the outer pair having only one compartment each for the fingers. As in addition to this I carried a haversack crammed tight with my belongings, it is not surprising that my agility proved unequal to the effort demanded of it, and that I rolled back into the snow while my sleigh shot on ahead.

When I had scrambled to my feet, my spectacles rendered almost opaque by snow and ice, I found that two or three sleighs had already dashed past, and that another was rushing down on me. My attempt to get into this one was an even greater failure than my first attempt had been. I was knocked down instantly, and by the time I had risen again, I saw that there were only two more sleighs to pass. This sight nerved me to a supreme effort, and I succeeded in gripping with my hands the rear end of the last sleigh but one. As I could not pull myself up, however, I was dragged along helplessly behind, and should soon have had to relinquish my hold, had not Sergeant Murray, a Canadian who happened to be riding in the sleigh, succeeded, but with great difficulty, in hoisting me aboard. Luckily the Russian driver was temporarily paralyzed (with drink), or he would promptly have thrown me out again.

The violence of my exertions so told on me that I never quite recovered my strength during the rest of this sleigh trip, and on the last day I was near getting lost completely. Through some misunderstanding the sleigh to which I was clinging got separated from the rest of the convoy, and at nightfall I found myself in a strange village, the only one of our party. A fatal tendency to sleep had nearly mastered me several times during the course of the day, and now, with no place to go to, I was hardly able to walk, and would willingly have lain down in the snow if I had not known well what that would have meant. The few houses that the village contained were crammed with people, while the streets and open spaces, as well as the roads for miles around, were filled with thousands of soldiers unable to find shelter. Forcing my way into one house I found it crowded with Russian officers, all fast asleep, and some of them sitting bolt upright in chairs, looking as if they were dead. The conviction that some of them were dead—dead of typhus—made me beat a hasty retreat, and then I tried another house, where I was lucky enough to find one man awake. He proved to be Colonel Ivantsev of the 14th Jaeger Volunteer Regiment, a kindly Russian officer, who, seeing my exhausted condition, insisted on my staying with him, gave me some tea, and allowed me to sleep on the floor. He himself spent most of the night trying to straighten out the hopeless affairs of his regiment, to get food for his soldiers, and to arrange for their departure next day. At 4 o’clock in the morning, while it was still very dark, I accompanied him in his sleigh to Taiga, passing all the way through a great forest which, with its solemn silence and its dark pine-trees laden heavily with snow, was a place of almost unearthly beauty. What set off that beauty astonishingly were the huge fires kindled in it by soldiers who had been unable to find shelter in the villages. Large numbers of such soldiers passed the night seated around those camp-fires, whose red flames lit up the white, frozen plain and illuminated the dark recesses of the forest. But though those great conflagrations, which dotted the taiga for miles and miles, were to the last degree picturesque, they meant, unfortunately, that thousands of poor soldiers could not get proper sleep. No wonder that I often saw men fast asleep in sleighs which they were supposed to be driving, and even on horses which they were riding.

At Taiga I met my companions at the railway station in our old carriage which had just come through from Bolotnaya, and which moved off soon after my arrival.

Thus came to an end a sleigh journey which was certainly no “joy-ride,” so far, at least, as I was concerned. If ever again I have to take part in a Russian retreat, I will pray that my flight be not in the winter.